Programming for the Newton using Macintosh, 2nd ed.

Acknowledgments

We wrote the first edition of this book for the Macintosh in 1994, and many kind and generous people have sent us corrections. Writing a second edition two years later for both Macintosh and Windows, we must first thank them for such a remarkable voluntary effort. These people are Tony Ozrelic, John Barshinger, John Schettino, Jeff Harrolle, Scott Ellsworth, J. R. Hughson, Mark Gadzikowski, and E. Patrick Shareck. We especially thank Robin Simpson, not only for his corrections, but for generously posting them to the comp.sys.newton.programmer newsgroup so that others could benefit from his work. Robin's a good bloke.

Newton has done a lot of growing in the last three years. The people the most responsible for it are the Newton team and the people at Newton Developer Training and Newton Developer Technical Support. For three years, they have often gone without vacations to answer just one more question, to fix just one more bug. These are good people to have at your back.

Most especially our thanks to Gabriel Acosta-Lopez, a supremely great guy. His mother should be proud. Gabriel's good company, helpful advice, and conscientious attitude make him a pleasure to work with--even when he is not being funny. Also, we want to thank Steve Strong for his long friendship and support of our work.

We particularly want to acknowledge the folks (past and present) of Newton Developer Technical Support. Mike Engber, Kent Sandvik, ZZ Zimmerman, Bob Ebert, Christopher Bell, Maurice Sharp, David Fedor, Ryan Robertson, and Henry Cate--the bug guys. They have gone over our training materials and book manuscripts for errors more times than we can remember, and all for the measly sum of a "thank you."

Then, there are our students at Apple Developer University. They were our guinea pigs for the development of the programming course for both versions of the Newton OS and ultimately for this book. From them, we learned what worked, what needed more time, and what a bright future Newton has. The folks at Apple may have seen to it that we understood Newton correctly; but our students patiently helped us refine the training materials, and in the long run made this book all the better for it.

On the book end of things, there are many people to whom we owe a debt of gratitude. We particularly thank our editor for the first edition, Chuck Glaser, at AP Professional. He saw the potential in Newton at its introduction at MacWorld in 1993, and had the courage to stand behind his vision. An author could have no better editor. While Chuck has gone on to bigger things (it was bound to happen) and his replacements Jenifer Niles and Jeff Pepper are fine individuals, we miss him all the same. There is also our agent, Carole McClendon, whose skill and professionalism found us this publisher.

We also had a slew of testers. On the first edition we had Allan Hoeltje and Matthew Krawitz. On the second edition we recruited most of Australia (at least a big portion of the Newton programmers there). Our deepest gratitude to these fine professionals, who include Stephen Wong, James T. Gambit, Darwin Liao, Andy Boggust, Gavin Maxwell, Greg Nash, and Neville Smythe. Most especially, Stephen Wong's herculean efforts on the second edition have our heartfelt thanks--he went over most of the manuscript with a fine-tooth comb, finding missing bits and subtle errors.

Many thanks to Loring Fiske-Phillips for his careful reading of the final drafts.

Even though these and many other unmentioned people gave time and energy to see to it that this book is without mistakes, some no doubt remain. While the presence of such annoying errors is solely our responsibility, we would be grateful if you report any you find in the text or code. If you, our clever readers, find some new ones, we will also gratefully acknowledge you in the next edition.

Last of all, we have some personal acknowledgments. This book could not have happened without the unending support of people in our day-to-day lives. We most especially want to thank Jean and Peter Drinkwine, Barbie and Loring Fiske-Phillips, and Gloria McKeehan for the kind willingness to handle the unending minutiae of our daily lives. We also thank Emily Drinkwine for her fine baby-sitting skills--children and writing are mutually exclusive activities and thanks to her both got done reasonably well. If all these people had not managed these responsibilities, this book would have taken much longer to write and would certainly have destroyed our senses of humor along the way. Our heartfelt and loving gratitude to you. (We said this in 1994 for the first time, but it is still true today; we just have more to be grateful for this time).


An online version of Programming for the Newton using Macintosh, 2nd ed. ©1996, 1994, Julie McKeehan and Neil Rhodes.

Last modified: 1 DEC 1996